


Soul Food

by mynameisnemo



Category: Supernatural
Genre: 5+1 Things, Cooking, Dean Cooks, Food, Gen, Men of Letters Bunker, Pre-Series, Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-08
Updated: 2014-11-08
Packaged: 2018-02-24 13:01:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,735
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2582336
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mynameisnemo/pseuds/mynameisnemo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dean doesn’t know where Sam gets off teasing him about cooking, ungrateful brat had probably forgotten that Dean used to cook all the time when they were kids. Thing was, Dean loved food, especially the foods that were flavored by the places they came from, and he had picked up a few things in the kitchen in his past three decades on earth.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Soul Food

Dean doesn’t know where Sam gets off teasing him about cooking. Sure, the kid eats healthy; salads and chicken and sometimes the vegetarian option at whatever diner they stopped at on the road, but it isn’t as if Dean has ever seen Sam cook, beyond microwaving gas station burritos or making a cup of motel coffee. 

Ungrateful brat had probably forgotten that Dean used to cook all the time when they were kids. Sure, heating up spaghetti-os or making tuna noodle casserole with only half the ingredients wasn’t exactly fine cuisine and definitely had some interesting results, but clearly it hadn’t stunted the kid’s growth any. 

Dean doesn’t claim to be Emeril or anything, but he had picked up a few things in his past three decades on earth and he isn’t completely hopeless when faced with raw ingredients and mealtime.

\- - - 

Burgers were one of the first things Dean ever learned to make after Sam went to Stanford. He’d gone up to stay with Bobby for a bit while Dad went on a bender and the older hunter had assigned him to KP duty in exchange for new shocks, tires, and a water pump for the Impala.

It had taken several tries to get them right. The patty wanted to fall apart at first, then he cooked them too slowly and they were almost inedible. Finally he got it, learning a trick Bobby said his wife used to use of putting a pot lid over the patty to melt the cheese faster. 

It wasn’t as hard to figure out how to make fries, and pretty soon Bobby was saying he didn’t think a diner burger would ever be truly satisfying again. 

Soon after, Dad showed back up, looking tired but sober, and said there was a nasty poltergeist in Nashville, so Dean said goodbye to home cooked burgers and hello to rocksalt and vengeful spirits.

\- - - 

It was just over a year later that he rolled into Athens, OH, intending a one night stand with the town. He was there to check the mail in one of their boxes, hopefully pick up some new credit cards, hustle some pool, and be out of town at dawn the next morning on his way to meet Dad down in Alabama.

A month later he had forwarded the cards to Bobby for Dad to pick up, moved in with Cassie Robinson in her off campus apartment, and learned to make pizza. It wasn’t frozen pizza either. He had learned how to make dough from scratch, to measure the ingredients exactly and to know how warm the water had to be to raise the yeast into a frothy little head without killing it. 

He also learned not to leave the bowl of dough unattended in the warm kitchen while going off to have marathon sex, lest it triple in size from what it was supposed to be. 

Cassie’s roommate worked at an Italian pizzeria near campus and soon Dean could spin the dough out and toss it in the air like a pro. Okay, there was that one time it got behind the fridge, but it was just the once. 

He knew exactly how much cheese and sauce and meat to put on without overloading it. Cassie complained about having to buy new pants if he didn't stop making pizza for dinner. 

He was going to learn to make Chicago-style deep dish, the kind Sammy and Dad liked so much when they stopped in Chicago once for Dean’s birthday. 

Then he made the mistake of letting his feelings for Cassie get the best of him. Soon he was rolling out of town, headed for Arizona and a possible chupacabra, which was actually a rabid coyote, and had no intention of looking back or making pizza again for a while.

\- - - 

In Dean’s opinion, the winter of 2002 had sucked.

Sam was still gone, and Dad was going solo more and more often, which meant Dean was going solo more often too. On top of that, when he and Dad did hunt together, everything seemed to go wrong. On top of _that_ , instead of staying down in Texas where it was actually fairly warm even in February, Dad decided to go up to northern Minnesota to investigate a series of drownings. The Impala’s heat wasn’t working well and she wasn’t made for sliding around in the ice, so they left her at Pastor Jim’s before continuing north in the truck. 

Dean supposed, in retrospect, that he should have been paying more attention to where he was walking and less attention to his vehicle-related separation anxiety, but it wasn’t as though the boundaries to the Ojibway curse were that clear anyway. One minute he was standing on part of the iced over lake, next there was a crack and he was inhaling a mouthful of really fucking cold water. 

Disoriented, lungs screaming, and feeling like someone was pushing needles into every part of his body, Dean flailed in the water, trying to figure out which way was up. He knew the best way was to breathe out some bubbles and follow them towards the surface, but all the air had been driven out of him when he crashed through the ice, and it was too dark in the water to tell where he had fallen through. 

Real panic was starting to set in when he felt something yank him by the waist, and remembered that he and dad had been wearing ropes tied around them for just this reason. In moments he was being hauled back up through the ice and Dad was dragging him by his collar across the ice and onto shore near the truck. 

It might have been more embarrassing to be stripped naked by his dad right out in the open if he hadn’t been busy coughing up a gallon of lake water and what felt like part of his lung. Instead, Dean was mildly surprised when he was suddenly yanked to stand and walk the two steps to the truck cab. At some point Dad had turned the truck and the heat on and had wrapped a heavy quilt around Dean. 

Time got weird after that. Adrenaline and shivering took up all of his attention between answering questions _“Did you hit your head?” “No, sir.” “Can you feel your fingers and toes?” “Yessir, wish I couldn’t though.” “Did something pull you through?” “I think the ice just broke.”_ , and trying to keep his eyes open _“Stay awake, Dean, until I check you out at the motel.” “Yessir.”_.

Finally, two hours later, he had been poked and prodded, discovered he had one deep laceration to his arm from going through the ice and another to his back when he was dragged up, showered until he was no longer blue, and dressed as warmly as possible. Dad gave him half a cup of Irish coffee and sent him to bed. 

Dean had expected to wake up sore and stiff; he didn’t expect to wake up coughing, his throat already sore, and with the funny tilting sensation that usually came with a high grade fever. It took three tries to get out of bed, between the coughing and trying not to pull any of the twenty-five stitches in his back or arm. Finally he made it vertical and pulled the quilt he’d been sleeping under with him. When he got to the living room he was surprised to find his duffle packed and sitting next to the door, along with a new pair of boots that exactly matched the ones he’d been wearing the day before. 

“I lost one of your shoes yesterday,” Dad said, coming into the living room from the kitchen, holding a mug of coffee. 

Dean grunted in reply and swiped the mug, inhaling the steam in the hopes that it would ease his cough. “We done?” he asked, gesturing towards his packed duffle. 

“Not even close, but you’ve been coughing all night and I don’t want you outside for hours at a time while we try to figure out the curse. Caleb’s meeting us at Pastor Jim’s. He’s going to come up and help while you stay there and try to avoid developing pneumonia.”

Dean considered arguing but seeing as he really wanted to do was go back to sleep, he decided it wasn’t worth the energy. 

A week later, he was laid up in Pastor Jim’s rectory, dosed on enough antibiotics and cough medicine to wipe out an entire research lab of bacteria, and bored out of his mind. 

Dad had broken the curse with Caleb, then headed to Nebraska to deal with the clan of witches that Caleb had been investigating before Dean’s little swim, leaving Dean alone in Blue Earth, trying to fend off Pastor Jim’s coddling. 

Dean was tired of chicken broth and hot tea, and tired of the nausea he always got when he was on antibiotics, and tired of laying in bed reading car magazines, and tired of being sick. He was sneaking towards the front door, keys in hand, wearing three shirts, a hoodie he had stolen from Sam, and his coat, when a strong hand came down on his shoulder. 

“Going somewhere?” 

Dean turned, hoping he didn’t look like he’d been caught but knowing that he had. 

“Uh...just going to the car-”

“Dean, I could see through you when you were thirteen and sneaking out to go swimming with Jessica Davidson and I can see through you just as well now,” Jim sighed, running a hand through his hair. Dean absently wondered how many of the grey ones the pastor blamed on him. “You have another week of antibiotics to go and if you’re not running a fever anymore then I’ll gladly allow you to go find another lake to fall in, but until then let’s go sit in the kitchen. You can catch me up on Bobby and your father’s recent hunts and dinner will be ready soon.”

Dean knew Jim was just trying to help, knew he was being a pain in the ass, and knew he wasn’t up to driving anywhere, especially not in the snow. With a sigh that provoked yet another coughing fit he pocketed his keys and stipped out of his coat, following Jim back into the kitchen. “I’m tired of chicken broth,” he announced, trying not to wince at how much he sounded like Sam when he was sick, young, and whiny. 

“Good thing I made a treat then,” Jim replied, lifting the lid of a pot on the stove and peering in, then stirring the contents before ladling some into a bowl. 

Dean noted that what little he could smell certainly didn’t smell like chicken broth. 

“One of my parishioners is from Austin, Texas. She shared this recipe with me when I mentioned that I had never had chili that wasn’t out of a can. She said it’s not quite traditional but a little more healthy than the usual Texan chili.” 

Dean raised his eyebrows at the bowl, it looked like there were vegetables in it, but decided that anything was better than another round of chicken broth and kept his mouth shut while Jim threw a handful of cheese and a scoop of sour cream on top of the chili and handed the dish over. 

Dean saw the glass of water sitting next to his usual place at the table but didn’t register it until he had swallowed the first mouthful of food. He gulped half the glass down in a go and coughed, looking up a Jim who was watching him with clear amusement. 

“S' hot,” Dean mumbled, stirring the chili around a bit and gathering some of the sour cream on the end of his next spoonful. 

“That’s actually about half strength, I figured your stomach might not react well to Mina’s recommended level of spice.”

Dean carefully ate the rest of the bowl, taking big sips of water in between mouthfuls. When he was done, he noticed he could breathe better than he had in days. “Got a kick like Dad’s kitchen sink soup. Think my sinuses will be clear for the rest of my life.”

Pastor Jim smiled and cleared the table. “If you can manage to stay put here until you’re well, I’ll teach you how to make it full strength.” 

Dean grinned, imagining Sam taking a bite. The kid wasn’t…hadn’t been that fond of spicy food the last time Dean had seen him. Good mood ruined, Dean trudged back upstairs after mumbling something at Jim, hoping to sleep his thoughts about errant little brothers away. 

It took two weeks, the rest of the antibiotics, and more sleep than Dean thought he’d gotten since he was a toddler, but eventually he was well enough to get Jim to teach him the secret ways of Texas chili. 

Jim got out a notecard, stained and splattered and written in an unfamiliar hand, all looping circles and rounded out points. Dean read the recipe and followed it to the letter, though most of the ingredients were just listed without a measurement. It took five hours but eventually, after Pastor Jim had finished Sunday mass, Dean served them both up two bowls of steaming chili and they sat and ate it, grinning like fools at each other with tears streaming down their cheeks. 

The next day, Dean packed the Impala and left, bypassing Jim’s offers of a place to stay until winter passed. Ignored the hints of a roof that needed fixing, and a swimming hole that needed reshoring once spring came along. Disregarded the unspoken offer to settle down and make a home now that he didn’t have Sam to look after, now that his father was leaving him. 

It took Dean months to realise that while he was loading the car, Jim slipped the Texas chili recipe card into the glovebox. Dean entertained the thought a few times of making the chili for Dad but it never seemed like they had time or stayed anywhere with a kitchen, and eventually Dean slipped the notecard in between the pages on his copy of ‘Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance’ and forgot about it.

\- - - 

Dean had always considered Kansas home. It was part of the reason he kept the Kansas plates on the Impala long after it was smart to anymore.

Despite that, he never spent much time in the state. Memories of the fire, of life before it, haunted him with even more tenacity than usual when he was inside the state lines, so he avoided being there as much as possible. 

Dean had eaten barbeque all over: Texas, the Carolinas, Tennessee, the list went on. Of course, each region claimed that their version was the best, but Dean knew that each had its own unique flavor and advantage. 

Still, it was ironic that he learned to barbeque Kansas City-style in Rhode Island of all places. They’d been there for weeks, a nice break after leaving Utah in July, the roads shimmering as they followed one another down the tarmac in the middle of the day. 

They were staying in a bed and breakfast right next to the harbour, investigating a phantom ship that kept appearing at night and causing other ships to crash. _“It could be a pirate ghost ship, Dad.” “It’s not a pirate ghost ship, Dean.”_

It was warm and sunny and Dean was taking advantage by swimming and laying around during the day while Dad was sleeping. 

It was midafternoon on a Saturday and he had been walking around the woods behind the B&B when a scent caught his attention. It didn’t take him long to follow it back to the cabins behind the main house, nor to find the resident handyman standing over the grill. 

“Hey there.” 

Dean looked at the kid, he looked about Sam’s age, standing over the grill. “Hey.”

The kid grinned, moving forward to flip the cooking meat that had originally caught Dean’s attention. Dean watched, taking in tanned, muscular shoulders and sandy crew cut hair and a grin that promised trouble. “You’re the kid staying in the big house, aintcha?” 

Dean snorted, he was clearly the older between the two of them. “Sure, who’re you?”

“Roy. Want some barbeque?”

Turned out Roy was from Kansas but he was working maintenance over the summer for his aunt and uncle who owned the bed and breakfast. He was a senior at West Point and knew how to get in more trouble than Dean could dream of. He also ate Kansas City-style barbeque everyday for dinner - said it reminded him of home and he didn’t get many chances to cook during the semester. By the end of the week, he had Dean addicted to the sweet and tangy sauce that he made on the weekends, and Dean had gotten almost as good at cooking perfect burnt ends as Roy was himself. 

They spent so much time goofing off together that Dad threatened to move to a motel farther inland if Dean couldn’t keep his mind on the hunt and Roy’s aunt told him she was going to dock his pay. Dean didn’t care. He hadn’t had a friend like that in a long time (no, not since Sammy left, that’s just pathetic), and Roy didn’t seem to mind as long as Dean didn’t. 

By the end of summer, Roy was nearly sniper-skilled at shooting, knew more hand-to-hand combat than anyone else in his class at West Point, and was so tan from swimming with Dean that he looked like a ranch hand. Dean was covered head to toe in freckles, could make any kind of Kansas City-style barbeque on demand in his sleep, and had single handedly brought down a rogue phantom ship. _“They weren’t pirates, Dean.” “I told you all that swimming with Roy would help, Dad.” “Mmhmm.”_

They headed southwest, chasing the end of summer and a rumour of a haunting in some abandoned mines in Nevada. Roy went back to school and Dean really did mean to keep in touch, but next thing he knew Roy was graduating and heading off to the Rockpile. 

It took six years before Dean could bear to eat barbeque again, one lazy afternoon while he was living with Lisa and Ben. That night he googled Roy and found out the kid died in someplace called Kandahar not long after Dean left Stanford with Sam in tow. He decided to learn to barbeque Indiana style after that and buried the recipe for sweet and tangy sauce back in his mind.

\- - - 

New Orleans was always one of Dean’s favourite places to go. They had been there a few times. The whole southern end of Louisiana was a hot bed for ghosts and witches and zombies and swamp monsters. He loved the food, the culture, and the reliability of a hunt. There were hunters that lived their entire professional career in those swamps and never got bored.

Dad went west, saying something about a stretch of road and men disappearing, but Dean didn’t mind being sent south, as the bayou was warm and muggy even a month after summer officially ended. Rather than staying in a motel, he found a shotgun shack on the outskirts of the city with a room-for-rent sign. Sitting on the porch was a beautiful girl, who spoke Cajun french as a first language, shelling peas. Breakfast and dinner were included in the room rent, after a small negotiation of fees, and Dean lost himself quickly in beignets and grits and biscuits and gravy and po’boys and jambalaya. 

He also quickly lost himself in soft skin and close-cropped tight curls and lazing around in sweaty afterglow, learning smatterings of the molasses slow French dialect in front of a box fan before dinner. 

One day he came home to find Mercedes in the kitchen, a pot of shellfish stock on the stove and a myriad of ingredients he was unfamiliar with laid out on the kitchen table. He had been fruitful in his quest for information that day, but, unfortunately, the handful of Cajun French phrases he had used to get the book of spells he was carrying wasn’t enough to decipher them. He quickly traded chores with Mercedes, following her instructions on making a roux and then adding the vegetables, while she sat at the table smoking Newports and copying a different sort of ingredient list into English. 

They ate crawfish etouffeé that Mercedes said was almost as good as her own, then turned on the record player and the attic fan and found enough time to get sticky in the late evening while Jim Morrison moaned in the background. 

It took two more days for Dean to finish cleaning up the mess of hoodoo that killed the practitioner and unleashed chaos in the fifth ward; one to collect ingredients and another to cast the counterspell. He planned to stick around for a little while longer, maybe learn the secret to a perfect roux or how to make the beignets that Mercedes served up so easily in the morning, but when he called to check in, Dad didn’t answer. 

It was nearly two hundred miles out of the way to go to Stanford first, but he drove there anyway, wanting to see Sam and knowing he couldn’t be that close and not take the extra time. What started out simple turned out not to be, and Dean didn’t have a lot of time for cooking for ages after that.

\- - -

Dean gives Sam his burger and grins when Sam looks completely blissed out. He doesn’t mention the fresh peaches he picked up at the store, nor the pie plate he’d made a special trip to Wal-Mart in Concordia to get. He doesn’t tell Sam that he has plans to practice making dough until he perfects it, flaky and soft with sticky sweet fruit spilling out of the slices when he cuts it.

Pie has been a constant in Dean’s life since he was four years old but he can still remember Mom’s pie, and, he thinks, now that he has his very own kitchen, he’ll spend all the time it takes to learn how to duplicate it. 

Then Kevin calls, and Dean finds things spiralling out of control again, with little time to experiment further in the kitchen.

**Author's Note:**

> I spent most of the time I was writing listening to Alison Krauss and sipping lemonade and every time I even think of this story I get hungry. Sorry for anyone who might have gotten hunger pangs while reading.
> 
> Beta reading thanks to [Henry](https://twitter.com/HFBIII) and the ever lovely [Katrina](http://hell-aint-complicated.tumblr.com).


End file.
